Fordham Center on Religion and Culture

1 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture Fordham Center on Religion and Culture GLOBALIZATION AND THE ECOLOGY OF CARING: UNTOLD STORIES; UNSUNG HEROES Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus Pope Auditorium, 113 West 60th Street November 10, 2010 Moderator William F. Baker The Claudio Aquaviva Chair and Journalist in Residence at Fordham; President Emeritus, Channel Thirteen/WNET. Speaker: Fred de Sam Lazaro Journalist and Filmmaker; Director, Project for Under- Told Stories, St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. Panelists Jacqueline Novogratz Founder & CEO, Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture firm that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solving global poverty. Lawrence MacDonald Vice President, Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to reducing global poverty. To view the video segments referenced in this transcript, please go here: PETER STEINFELS: Good evening. Welcome to the Forum on Globalization and the Ecology of Caring. I am Peter Steinfels, Co-Director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, which has organized this evening’s Forum, but which has done so in collaboration and in connection with a larger and quite extraordinary event. To say a few words about this larger event, I am happy to introduce an appropriately extraordinary individual. Please welcome the President of Fordham University, Father Joseph McShane. 2 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture FATHER JOSEPH McSHANE: Thank you, Peter, for your appropriate introduction, a far-too-generous introduction. On behalf of the whole University, especially the Board of Trustees, represented particularly ably this evening by our Board Chair, John Tognino, over here, and representing our West Coast Board members, John Kriss, over here, it is a great honor and a grace for me to welcome you to this evening’s Forum. As Peter told you, the Forum is sponsored by our Center on Religion and Culture, but it is also this evening sponsored by the whole University. Why? A couple of years ago, the University was invited by the Opus Prize Foundation, a foundation headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to partner with them in searching for and identifying suitable worthy candidates for the Opus Prize. The Opus Prize is the most extraordinary prize for humanitarianism in the world. Through the generosity of the Opus Prize Foundation, a gift or a prize of $1 million is given to an extraordinary person or organization who leads a faith-based initiative to somewhere in the world but works in obscurity and has entrepreneurial skill, so that the work that they are doing can be carried on into the future. As part of the work that goes into the location, the nomination, and finally the spotlighting of the award winner, the University engaged in a very long process where we had two different groups working with us. One were the spotters. They were men and women throughout the world which we engaged and who worked with us to identify men and women working in faith-based environments who were doing precisely what the Opus Prize Foundation wanted to honor. Then we had a jury, a blue-ribbon jury, who reviewed all of the nominations that came in from all over the world. They chose a slate of finalists. Then we sent other spotters out to go and see how the work of the men and women who were nominated went forward on the ground. This was for the University a most extraordinary undertaking and, as I said at the beginning, a great grace, because the University got to know pretty well men and women all over the world who have given their lives to the service of others and who are making a difference in the lives of the poorest of the poor, those men and women whom the world 3 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture would sooner forget. After two years of very hard work, we came down to the two finalists. The two finalists are with us this evening. I will introduce them briefly here. You will be, over the course of the next two days, invited by us really to increase spiritually on what you learn from them, because these very humble finalists are saints rich in spirit, rich in hope, and they transform the world in the work that they do. The first is Sister Beatrice Chipeta, who is over here. She is a Sister of the Holy Rosary. Sister Beatrice is from Malawi. She works in Malawi. If you go online, if you Google her, you will learn all about what she does. This is a woman who seems to have endless energy and who has a network of orphanages and also a network of educational centers all throughout Malawi. She feeds and cares for 10,000 people a year on a regular basis, and she does it with great hope and with I would say great trust in God that she would have what she needs to do the work that God has given her. She is an amazing person. This is her first visit to New York. She has been adopted by a parish in the Diocese of Syracuse, and she will meet her benefactors from Syracuse for the first time this week. [Applause] Next to her is seated Father John Halligan, who is a Jesuit, who is a member of the New York Province but who has spent most of his life in Quito, Ecuador. He is a native of the South Bronx, from St. John’s Episcopal Parish, and went to Fordham Prep, something that we forgive him for this evening. [Laughter] He has been in Ecuador now for forty-eight years. He began a shoeshine boys’ operation many, many years ago so that he could reach out to and really redeem the poor boys who lived and worked on the streets in Quito. Now, after all these years of working, he has the Working Boys’ Center, which is an educational operation and a trade school operation. He has been remarkable in what he has done. He is so remarkable that he convinced a non-missionary order of nuns from Dubuque, Iowa, to break their rule and become missionaries with him in Quito. This is John Halligan. John, stand please. [Applause] Ladies and gentlemen, the occasion for this evening’s Forum is our honoring of these two modern-day saints, and their lives invite us to reflect upon globalization and the ecology of caring in the 21st century. On behalf of the University, I welcome you and I thank you for being part of our celebration of these two remarkable saints. [Applause] 4 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture PETER STEINFELS: Thank you very much. Before turning over this evening’s Forum to its moderator, let me beg, plead, or command everyone to silence their cell phones or any other noise-making devices. The pencils and index cards that you found at your places are there for your questions. Please write those questions, please write them legibly, at any time in the course of the discussion this evening and hold them up, and our student assistants who are posted on the sides will collect them at that time and one by one bring them forward for the last segment of the Forum. Many of you already know William F. Baker, for two decades the CEO of both WNET/Thirteen and WLIW/Twenty-one. At least you know him and his bowtie from his successful on-screen campaigns to keep public television here in New York on a firm financial footing. Without that, of course, nothing could have happened. With that, what happened was a long list of broadcasting achievements that brought WNET hundreds of the highest media awards, including seven Emmy awards for Bill personally, as well as election to both Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He knows television from both its public and commercial sides. Once upon a time in his commercial TV days, he launched the career of a talk-show host named Oprah Winfrey. Despite his successes, he did not hesitate to write a book, provocatively titled Down the Tube: An Insider’s Account of the Failure of American Television. Besides earning a Ph.D. from Case Western University, he has received numerous honorary degrees, including one from Fordham, where we are privileged to have him since his retirement from WNET and WLIW as holder of the Claudio Aquaviva Chair and Journalist in Residence. Please welcome Bill Baker. WILLIAM BAKER: Thank you, Peter, for that wonderful intro. A couple things. First, I love it here at Fordham. This is a special place. I was thinking about the gorum tonight. Where else in the world could it happen but here at Fordham University? This is the kind of institution this is. Look at Father McShane, John Tognino, our Chairman — these are the kinds of people that want things like this to happen, that make them happen. Thank you for that. 5 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture I also, believe it or not, after decades of being on television all over the world and everything, sometimes get nervous in public venues, especially after following the best speaker in the world, Father McShane. I was thinking about that here tonight, and I thought: You know, anybody that shows up to this kind of panel or this kind of event, you folks must really be special. I think that really is true. If you care about this subject, you are a very special person.

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